Luis del Romero Renau, geographer and professor at the University of Valencia, tells us that the gentrification that we repeatedly talk about in the media is that building in the Ruzafa neighborhood (to give an example) in which there is only one neighbor left because the rest are rented apartments, closed or "used only by Airbnb and in which the key to the portal is circulating from hand to hand between people who don't even know each other".
We went to the professor, a specialist in Human Geography and with various academic publications on tourism focused on the city of Valencia, after the publication of a study led by researchers from the New Perspectives in Tourism and Leisure group (NOUTUR) of the Open University of Catalonia that concludes that the Airbnb platform "takes advantage of the identities of destinations and their communities, and commodifies them".
The study, focused on the cities of Barcelona and Madrid, concludes that the platform gives a "colonialist vision" of the neighborhoods of the cities where it is implemented, a phenomenon that Romero Renau assures "is already happening in Valencia". Neighborhoods such as Seu-Xerea-Mercat, the always nocturnal Ruzafa, Ciutat Vella and now also the Cabanyal or the Botànic are areas of the city, as he explains, that are added to the model of "walkable and museum city that is being built. The way of planning the city is more aligned with tourist interests than with the citizen", he maintains.
Here, and with official data from August 2022, 66.6% of the apartments that are rented through the online offer in Valencia belong to the Airbnb platform, 23.3% are on Booking and HomeAway and TripAdvisor stay with 6.7% and 2.3%, respectively.
Most of them are in the historic center of the city, with a total of 6,691 places, where on any given day it is easy to see a constant movement of suitcases dragged by groups of young people, an image that also already exists in outlying neighborhoods.
In fact, there are 2,045 places in the so-called accommodation in the "environs" of the city, which includes the postal codes of Patraix or Malilla, for example, and these have increased by 9.3%.
"As much as the neighborhood culture is defended, and I know that what I am going to say is strong, I see more continuity than discontinuity in the policies that the PP applied before and those of now. And neither has there been a critical reflection on the international tourism," he says.
He already warned of this in 2018, before the pause in the pandemic, in Tourism, collaborative economies and the new geography of urban conflicts, in which he already stated that a legal framework for digital platforms is "necessary" as well as "a new comprehensive tourism strategy for the city, with clear regulations on land use, sustainable mobility measures and a better distribution of the tourist offer to allow living in the center or in tourist areas".
"In the pandemic there has been a break due to circumstances, but realities that tense coexistence happen again," he says. And he reflects on how València is now absorbing a tourist model similar to that of neighboring Barcelona.
"Both follow a model that has a certain explanation. Since the financial crisis, the European middle classes have lost purchasing power, but they still want to travel, although paying less. Today, the Valencia model after the crisis has been based on tourism and construction; in sun, beach and brick. And that explains why Airbnb feels so comfortable here because for a Belgian or a Swede, València is still cheap".
The truth is that among the international tourists that Valencia receives, the European is the most relevant. The origin is mainly focused on Italy, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium, followed by the United States, a country from which a total of 52,493 travelers came.
